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The thing is at least in terms of borders, they did trace a map - albeit one from the early nineties before the breakup of Yugoslavia. Which makes their decision to label Serbia as an independent nation even funnier because Serbia was a constituent part of Yugoslavia!

This is among the less consequential of mistakes Fox news makes on a regular basis, so don't worry about it too much. The population of Americans who watch Fox and the population of Americans who would travel to those parts of Europe ever don't really overlap much, and both groups are generally proud that they don't overlap.

This is among the less consequential of mistakes Fox news makes on a regular basis.

Those are two entirely different concepts.
There is a difference between an error being almost impossible to make, and one that causes "more damage".
Actually, the fact that it is ultimately inconsequential makes it even weirder.
It is more WORK to do it wrong, than to do it right, and if it is of no consequence, why do it at all.

I still cannot fathom how this happened. It literally takes a MORON to make this kind of mistake.

Let me put this in perspective: think about how dumb the average Communications major in college is, and then realize that the average Fox Newscaster is in the bottom 10% of the bell curve that has that idiot as the center.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if fox didn't make all of those full screen graphics. I am a video student and we have a folder on our network with full screen jumpbacks and other news graphics for our use. They're called "Digital Juice" which I assume is the name of the company that makes these.

Some of the ones we have on our network I have recognized elsewhere before, including on Fox News.

These types of graphics are very complicated to make and they can't just be thrown together.

And if they did make them, then the person making it clearly has something more to think about then location.

This looks like it was used as a transition and not an actual map that they referenced therefore, it really can't be taken seriously (much like Bill O'Riley) and therefore they could have chosen an older style or some shit.

Weather they made them or bought them, my point is that these take a while to make and they don't crank out new ones for every story and whoever made them had more important things to worry about than placement, I imagine, or they had been awake, working on this graphic for 3 days straight.

News is EXTREMELY fast paced. That really doesn't seem like something that would get caught. Seriously, a news cast can become a complete train wreck at the first problem. The anchors look like they have their shit together but I can promise you that 9 out of 10 times someone in the control room is freaking the fuck out.

Most likely an intern got stuck making this graphic. Its a 4 hour job, and he probably got 30 minutes to get it done. They could have just bought the actual map to use as a source for around $100, give or take; but Im sure the art-director did not approve the stock image expense.

As a Slovenian with Bosnian parents, I am fully aware of how respected he is, and I share that respect, and even though I know he had some controversial tactics, but... he was still literally a million times better than what's going on right now. Nobody I know of who lived in his day has any of the things he done against him.

Fucking nationalists thinking that getting their own country will save all of their problems when instead they fucked it up even more. They fucked it up real bad!

As someone who was born in Croatia, grew up in Montenegro, with Serbian/Slovenian parents, currently living and working in USA... Fuck all them politicians and other ignorant/oppressive dickheads! I am the citizen of the world and your silly little boarders mean nothing to me. We are all brothers and sisters (and gender neutral broisters?!) as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, really fuck nationalists. I mean, Yugoslavia was what it was, some will say it was horrible, others (majority) will say it was fantastic, but at least it was very well respected in the world and had a considerable political influence. Now NONE of the republics are nearly as reputable, we're all going down the toilet. Basically, we accomplished nothing. Independence at first, for a few years, and now we're joining the EU.

Are you actually Serbian? This seems like a very Serbia-centric viewpoint. I mean, I'm no expert but I did spend a while in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo last summer and it seems that historically:

Serbians were the only ones propping up Yugoslavia as it disintegrated

Internal conflicts post-Tito were much bigger than you're making them out to be

The Yugoslav military was majority Serbian

Milosevic preached Serbian superiority, and wouldn't retreat from power

By the end of Yugoslavia, they had both broken ties with the West and with the Kremlin, and their influence in anything but their own affairs was paltry

The system was governed by a weak, rotating presidency for 9 years

There was a FUCKING GENOCIDE that happened upon dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Slovenia and Croatia will probably argue that they are WAY better off now without Yugoslavia, considering their EU accession

Kosovo's steady march towards independence and away from Serbia has definitely benifitted from the dissolution of Yugoslavia

How has this "accomplished nothing"? Yes, there was a lot of internal conflict, but would keeping the country together by force have been a better option? As I see it, there was NO chance of Yugoslavia to ever have been able to stay together.

Serbians were the only ones propping up Yugoslavia as it disintegrated

Serbs weren't propping up Yugoslavia because they wanted Yugoslavia, but because Serbian nationalists had a vision of "Greater Serbia", which included many regions now in Croatia, Bosnia, etc. Part of the reason why war with Slovenia and Macedonia were virtually non existent (or literally in the case of the latter).

Internal conflicts post-Tito were much bigger than you're making them out to be

Again, because of the nationalists. Yugoslavia had serious economic woes from 1980-1990, so populism rose. Similar to what is going on in the EU right now, of course to a lesser degree.

Rather than pronunciation issues, I always enjoy the syntactic errors that belie the way their native language works, like Germans saying "When I stood up this morning". I also remember my German exchange student complimenting me on getting a particular grammar issue correct every time, even though most Germans get it wrong. Correspondingly, he always got I/Me usage correct in English, even though many English speakers get them wrong when talking about two people (Me and Him were walking vs. I and He were walking). Heck, saying "It is I" is so unused as to sound strange, since everybody just says "It's me".

Thats hilarious. My friend studied abroad in Europe last semester and he met a Romanian girl who complained about everybody stereotyping her despite them knowing nothing about her or Romania. My friend said he knew what that felt like since he's American. She immediately goes "Oh, AMERICA! You Americans think you can do whatever you want and just push everyone else around!"

As someone who has had close contact with many non-Americans throughout my childhood, I can say that I've personally encountered this same hypocrisy countless times. And it has always been completely shameless. Sometimes it yields when I was able to chat them into reason, but usually any attempt at an objective point of view is countered with "Oh, you just think that because you're brainwashed" - a similarly hypocritical retort.

In their defense for dismissing me, I haven't entertained this kind of discussion in a long time, i'm mostly remembering this from my younger days. I guess it's hard for adults to take a kids/teenagers seriously, so it's not really that surprising that I was usually dismissed so easily.

The problem is the video proof would show the context. This is most likely a transition graphic that was onscreen for literally 2 seconds (probably with a big WHOOSH sound) between 2 segments. Since these graphics are expensive to produce and aren't onscreen very long, they probably aren't terribly concerned with pinpoint geographic accuracy. Sorry to rain of the Fox hate parade, but if someone wasn't advancing video frame-by-frame (or paused at a very lucky time) just to "catch" Fox doing something inaccurate (couldn't you just listen to it for a few minutes, instead), this probably would never have been noticed. It certainly isn't a campaign to reduce their viewers' geographic knowledge, unless their viewers are subliminal map speed readers.

NOTE: If video is provided that shows that this map truly was used during a segment to show the location of an event or something similar, I reserve the right to fully retract everything stated above and allow the Fox hate parade to continue, rain-free.

Ok I understand the issue at hand here is that the countries are completely fucked up on Fox news.... but why the hell would they abbreviate "Serbia" to "Serb" (considering none of the other countries are abbreviated)?

Question:
How can news shows such as FOX lie, tell things that are the opposite of what the truth is, and be called a "news show". Shouldn't this be illegal? Shouldn't they be fined due to informing people of information that isn't truthful? Is there no Government law about the media lying about things that are supposed to be factual?

Edit: Since some people say that "FOX News" is an entertainment channel, how are they allowed to call themselves "FOX NEWS"? Shouldn't they be forced to called "FOX entertainment news"?

The only time people watch it is when shit like this happens. After this interview The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council received so many complaints they had to post a memo asking people to stop writing in, because the number of complaints "exceeded the council's resources".

Actually, a local Fox news station in Florida won a court case verifying that it can legally lie when it reports the "news". Source (that's obviously not the only source, I just did a google search for a story that talked about it)

Each time the station asked Wilson and Akre to provide supporting documentation for statements in the story or to make changes in the content of the story, the reporters accused the station of attempting to distort the story to favor the manufacturer of BGH.

This does not really strike me as distorting the news as much as asking for evidence (at least that is how it reads)

Akre and Wilson responded in writing to WTVT threatening to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") alleging that the station had "illegally" edited the still unfinished BGH report

The show was never aired though.

After some legalese..

We reach this conclusion even though the whistle-blower aspect of Akre's 1236*1236 case was without legal merit from its inception.

So, basically, this is a case of a reporter alleging that the station was putting pressure on them and asking for documentation (well no fucking shit). They also allege that the station altered their story... but the judge found no merit in the case and determined that it did not violate any sort of distortion of facts or whatever "rule".

Other than their not being the most informed news station, I'll go on whatever news channel I see first. Last time I checked, I get the same news whether or not I watch Fox or CNN. During the Haiti earthquake, my journalism teacher had us wath different news stations and take notes. We were split into groups of four or five and each group watched a different station. We were not to reveal which channel we watched until afterwards. We all had basically the same news, the Fox group included. There was no opposite of truth involved.

Either your teacher was trolling you, or he/she just picked a poor example. An earthquake is an earthquake -- it's not as if Fox would report that it was a 9000 on the Richter scale; it doesn't serve their political ends.

However, you'd have seen the difference a day later, when the networks changed their focus to the government's -- specifically, the Obama administration's -- reaction to the Haiti earthquake.